It is obviously unfair to dismiss the entire contents of a book for a single tin-eared statement, but the clunker that comes near the end of The Earth and I by Gaia-theory originator James Lovelock is a doozy. The inexplicable passage follows a dozen essays by journalists, a Nobel Prize winner, and several Ivy League professors, who make a pretty good case for both the insignificance of human beings in the universe and their unique ability to end life as we know it here on Planet Earth. In an attempt, then, to give his shell-shocked readers a sliver of hope by celebrating the success of the Montreal Protocol, which banned chlorofluorocarbons in 1989, Lovelock crows about how these ozone-destroying compounds were replaced by hydrofluorocarbons, which, he writes, “are far less harmful to the planetary environment.”

Somewhere between the time Lovelock wrote those words and the publication of his book, hydrofluorocarbons were added to the Montreal Protocol’s list of banned substances – eliminating “less harmful” hydrofluorocarbons is expected to keep our warming planet’s temperature from rising by a full half-degree Celsius.

The inability of even an authority like Lovelock to keep pace with current events points out how quickly both the science and politics of climate change are a changing. In this light, understanding the holistic view of the planet’s processes – from the weather above us to the meaning of the geological history below our feet – has never been more important. The Earth and I delivers on these topics and more, while Jack Hudson’s engaging illustrations lure us in and invite the eye to linger. Many readers may well be tempted to do just that, but they shouldn’t – at last report, Greenland and Antarctica were melting at alarming fast and irreversible rates.

It is obviously unfair to dismiss the entire contents of a book for a single tin-eared statement, but the clunker that comes near the end of The Earth and I by Gaia-theory originator James Lovelock is a doozy. The inexplicable passage follows a dozen essays by journalists, a Nobel Prize winner, and several Ivy League professors, who make a pretty good case for both the insignificance of human beings in the universe and their unique ability to end life as we know it here on Planet Earth. In an attempt, then, to give his shell-shocked readers a sliver of hope by celebrating the success of the Montreal Protocol, which banned chlorofluorocarbons in 1989, Lovelock crows about how these ozone-destroying compounds were replaced by hydrofluorocarbons, which, he writes, “are far less harmful to the planetary environment.”

Somewhere between the time Lovelock wrote those words and the publication of his book, hydrofluorocarbons were added to the Montreal Protocol’s list of banned substances – eliminating “less harmful” hydrofluorocarbons is expected to keep our warming planet’s temperature from rising by a full half-degree Celsius.

The inability of even an authority like Lovelock to keep pace with current events points out how quickly both the science and politics of climate change are a changing. In this light, understanding the holistic view of the planet’s processes – from the weather above us to the meaning of the geological history below our feet – has never been more important. The Earth and I delivers on these topics and more, while Jack Hudson’s engaging illustrations lure us in and invite the eye to linger. Many readers may well be tempted to do just that, but they shouldn’t – at last report, Greenland and Antarctica were melting at alarming fast and irreversible rates.

If you purchase a copy of New Deal Photography: USA 1935-1943 by Peter Walther hoping to find iconic Farm Security Administration images, such as the migrant mother by Dorothea Lange or the father and his two sons running in a dust storm by Arthur Rothstein, you will not be disappointed. With almost 400 photographs filling its 608 pages, including numerous gems by Walker Evans, there’s plenty of room for the expected. But New Deal Photography goes well beyond these familiar images, powerful though they may be.

The book’s geographic organization forces us to consider Depression-era life in the Northeast and South, too, pushing our perspectives beyond the more familiar locations of Oklahoma and California. In addition, Walther’s collection of images features numerous color photographs by Russell Lee, Jon Collier, and Marion Post Wolcott. Again, we are used to seeing the era depicted in black and white, but seeing it in color confounds many of our expectations about what rural America actually looked like during those desperate years.

Walther’s essay for the book, which is printed in English, German, and French, presents a brisk but useful overview of the Farm Security Administration, from its founding mission to relocate Dust Bowl farmers in Oklahoma to greener pastures, to the photographs that were initially commissioned to document the relocation process. That might have been all the FSA did, but Walther introduces us to an FSA economist named Roy Stryker, who understood that photographs would do a much better job of telling the story of rural America in the late 1930s than any economic report ever could.

And Stryker didn’t just hire photographers to take the FSA’s pictures – he also hired artists, which is why painters like Ben Shahn were given Leica cameras and sent into the heartland of America. In the end, more than 10,000 photographs were shot, printed, and captioned, but there could have been a great many more. Apparently, Stryker punched holes in as many as 100,000 negatives he deemed unsuitable for the FSA’s collection, which means Walther’s New Deal Photography could have been even bigger.
– Ben Marks

If you purchase a copy of New Deal Photography: USA 1935-1943 by Peter Walther hoping to find iconic Farm Security Administration images, such as the migrant mother by Dorothea Lange or the father and his two sons running in a dust storm by Arthur Rothstein, you will not be disappointed. With almost 400 photographs filling its 608 pages, including numerous gems by Walker Evans, there’s plenty of room for the expected. But New Deal Photography goes well beyond these familiar images, powerful though they may be.

The book’s geographic organization forces us to consider Depression-era life in the Northeast and South, too, pushing our perspectives beyond the more familiar locations of Oklahoma and California. In addition, Walther’s collection of images features numerous color photographs by Russell Lee, Jon Collier, and Marion Post Wolcott. Again, we are used to seeing the era depicted in black and white, but seeing it in color confounds many of our expectations about what rural America actually looked like during those desperate years.

Walther’s essay for the book, which is printed in English, German, and French, presents a brisk but useful overview of the Farm Security Administration, from its founding mission to relocate Dust Bowl farmers in Oklahoma to greener pastures, to the photographs that were initially commissioned to document the relocation process. That might have been all the FSA did, but Walther introduces us to an FSA economist named Roy Stryker, who understood that photographs would do a much better job of telling the story of rural America in the late 1930s than any economic report ever could.

And Stryker didn’t just hire photographers to take the FSA’s pictures – he also hired artists, which is why painters like Ben Shahn were given Leica cameras and sent into the heartland of America. In the end, more than 10,000 photographs were shot, printed, and captioned, but there could have been a great many more. Apparently, Stryker punched holes in as many as 100,000 negatives he deemed unsuitable for the FSA’s collection, which means Walther’s New Deal Photography could have been even bigger.
– Ben Marks

]]>http://boingboing.net/2016/10/07/aschens-hefty-new-deal-photo.html/feed5487173400 years of equator hazings, and how I survived onehttp://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/400-years-of-equator-hazings.html
http://boingboing.net/2016/08/25/400-years-of-equator-hazings.html#commentsFri, 26 Aug 2016 01:26:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=479215

This summer, I spent a month aboard a research vessel in the Indian Ocean. At one point, we crossed the equator, which meant that those of us who had never done that before were treated to a special ceremony. In fact, it was a straight-up hazing, as I describe in a new article at Collectors Weekly.

The minute Pascal tied my hands together, I knew was in trouble. Pascal is a big man with an even bigger laugh, one of two hardworking, and hard-drinking, bosuns aboard a French research vessel called the Marion Dufresne. For his birthday a few days earlier, the crew had given Pascal a ball gag. Pascal thought this was hilarious, and immediately strapped the sex toy over his mouth, contorting his face in exaggerated expressions of mock distress, to the delight of the deckhands and officers assembled in the ship’s bar. Somehow, I couldn’t get that image out of my head, as Pascal, a mischievous grin now creasing his broad face, secured the knots around my wrists and gave me a wink. No doubt about it, whatever was about to happen next was totally going to suck.

]]>

This summer, I spent a month aboard a research vessel in the Indian Ocean. At one point, we crossed the equator, which meant that those of us who had never done that before were treated to a special ceremony. In fact, it was a straight-up hazing, as I describe in a new article at Collectors Weekly.

The minute Pascal tied my hands together, I knew was in trouble. Pascal is a big man with an even bigger laugh, one of two hardworking, and hard-drinking, bosuns aboard a French research vessel called the Marion Dufresne. For his birthday a few days earlier, the crew had given Pascal a ball gag. Pascal thought this was hilarious, and immediately strapped the sex toy over his mouth, contorting his face in exaggerated expressions of mock distress, to the delight of the deckhands and officers assembled in the ship’s bar. Somehow, I couldn’t get that image out of my head, as Pascal, a mischievous grin now creasing his broad face, secured the knots around my wrists and gave me a wink. No doubt about it, whatever was about to happen next was totally going to suck.

Right now, Cuba is red hot, hotter even than when Ry Cooder introduced most of the world to the Buena Vista Social Club almost 20 years ago. Thanks to the normalization of relations between the United States and the Caribbean island nation, American tourists will soon have a new place to drink alcohol, lie in the sun, and complain about their ceviche – regular flights between the U.S. and Cuba begin at the end of August.

Despite the diplomatic thaw, though, Cuba is still Castro country. Fidel, who just turned, 90, may be out of the picture, but his younger brother, Raul (age 85), remains firmly in control. Which makes the new Taschen reprint and expansion of photojournalist Lee Lockwood’s 1967 Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel so timely. The new 7 ½-pound, 360-page version – simplified to Castro’s Cuba — expands greatly on the original, supplementing the original 100 black-and-white photos with hundreds of color shots, a pair of essays by the late Castro documentarian Saul Landau, and, as usual with Taschen, high-production values.

Style, though, is not the book’s primary virtue. Its heart revolves around lengthy interviews Lockwood conducted with Fidel Castro in 1965, in which the revolutionary leader spelled out his vision for his country — from its agriculture to its education system to its arts. Castro considered the roles of his country’s institutions carefully, explaining at one point that what looked like political indoctrination to Americans was social education to the Cubans, who were, after all, being prepared for a new life in a new Communist society. “From an early age,” Castro tells Lockwood, “they must be discouraged from every egotistical feeling in the enjoyment of material things.” Lockwood captured examples of this social education with his camera, as seen in the numerous images of young people working in fields, but he was no propagandist for the Cuban leader who granted him so much exclusive access — Lockwood also got a priceless candid shot of two boys proudly posing with the latest album by The Beatles.
– Ben Marks

Right now, Cuba is red hot, hotter even than when Ry Cooder introduced most of the world to the Buena Vista Social Club almost 20 years ago. Thanks to the normalization of relations between the United States and the Caribbean island nation, American tourists will soon have a new place to drink alcohol, lie in the sun, and complain about their ceviche – regular flights between the U.S. and Cuba begin at the end of August.

Despite the diplomatic thaw, though, Cuba is still Castro country. Fidel, who just turned, 90, may be out of the picture, but his younger brother, Raul (age 85), remains firmly in control. Which makes the new Taschen reprint and expansion of photojournalist Lee Lockwood’s 1967 Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel so timely. The new 7 ½-pound, 360-page version – simplified to Castro’s Cuba — expands greatly on the original, supplementing the original 100 black-and-white photos with hundreds of color shots, a pair of essays by the late Castro documentarian Saul Landau, and, as usual with Taschen, high-production values.

Style, though, is not the book’s primary virtue. Its heart revolves around lengthy interviews Lockwood conducted with Fidel Castro in 1965, in which the revolutionary leader spelled out his vision for his country — from its agriculture to its education system to its arts. Castro considered the roles of his country’s institutions carefully, explaining at one point that what looked like political indoctrination to Americans was social education to the Cubans, who were, after all, being prepared for a new life in a new Communist society. “From an early age,” Castro tells Lockwood, “they must be discouraged from every egotistical feeling in the enjoyment of material things.” Lockwood captured examples of this social education with his camera, as seen in the numerous images of young people working in fields, but he was no propagandist for the Cuban leader who granted him so much exclusive access — Lockwood also got a priceless candid shot of two boys proudly posing with the latest album by The Beatles.
– Ben Marks

For several decades now, art critics and casual admirers alike have talked about Dale Chihuly’s art in terms of its forms. Indeed, the artist himself organizes his work largely by their physical shapes, as does his latest self-published coffee-table book, Chihuly on Fire, whose chapter titles range from “Baskets” and “Sea Forms” to “Jerusalem Cylinders” and “Rotolo.” But thumbing the pages of this sumptuous, hardcover volume, and reading the biographical essay by art-history professor Henry Adams, one is struck by the importance of color to Chihuly’s work.

The shift to color began in 1981, when Chihuly and his team of gaffers and assistants produced the first of what would become known as the Macchia series. These often enormous vessels, whose sides were usually folded and deformed, featured solid-color interiors, lip wraps in contrasting hues, and thousands of “jimmies” of pure crushed colored glass, usually set against a background of white glass “clouds.”

Even in his early days, Chihuly’s ambitions for his chosen medium seemed larger than the modest network of glass-art galleries around the country would have the wherewithal to support. By the time his Macchia pieces came along, the so-called craft arts, of which glass art was but one, were allowed to be exuberant and even a bit zany, but they were ultimately expected to exhibit good table manners, to sit uncomplainingly at the kid’s table of the art world. Gloriously and unapologetically garish, Chihuly’s Macchia pieces were a grinning, joyful, and emphatic “fuck you” to all of that. With the Macchia, Chihuly finally shook off the cobwebs of craft, not so much because the pieces pushed the boundaries of technique to ludicrous places – although they certainly did that – but because they pushed what was possible, and politic, with color.

Today, technique remains central to Chihuly’s work, while his teams of artisans have become ever-more adept, as the 2013 photo in Chihuly on Fire of two assistants in helmeted, fireproof space suits preparing to catch a still-glowing piece dramatically shows. To be clear, it’s okay to be impressed by that sort of thing, to get sucked into the spectacle that is Chihuly. After all, lots of artists have made careers of astounding viewers with physical spectacle, as anyone who has walked within the rusty, leaning walls of a curving Richard Serra can attest. In a way, though, Chihuly takes the greater aesthetic risk by being brash enough to demand that his creations are also, well, beautiful. For that, color rather than form has been his most capable collaborator. ]]>

For several decades now, art critics and casual admirers alike have talked about Dale Chihuly’s art in terms of its forms. Indeed, the artist himself organizes his work largely by their physical shapes, as does his latest self-published coffee-table book, Chihuly on Fire, whose chapter titles range from “Baskets” and “Sea Forms” to “Jerusalem Cylinders” and “Rotolo.” But thumbing the pages of this sumptuous, hardcover volume, and reading the biographical essay by art-history professor Henry Adams, one is struck by the importance of color to Chihuly’s work.

The shift to color began in 1981, when Chihuly and his team of gaffers and assistants produced the first of what would become known as the Macchia series. These often enormous vessels, whose sides were usually folded and deformed, featured solid-color interiors, lip wraps in contrasting hues, and thousands of “jimmies” of pure crushed colored glass, usually set against a background of white glass “clouds.”

Even in his early days, Chihuly’s ambitions for his chosen medium seemed larger than the modest network of glass-art galleries around the country would have the wherewithal to support. By the time his Macchia pieces came along, the so-called craft arts, of which glass art was but one, were allowed to be exuberant and even a bit zany, but they were ultimately expected to exhibit good table manners, to sit uncomplainingly at the kid’s table of the art world. Gloriously and unapologetically garish, Chihuly’s Macchia pieces were a grinning, joyful, and emphatic “fuck you” to all of that. With the Macchia, Chihuly finally shook off the cobwebs of craft, not so much because the pieces pushed the boundaries of technique to ludicrous places – although they certainly did that – but because they pushed what was possible, and politic, with color.

Today, technique remains central to Chihuly’s work, while his teams of artisans have become ever-more adept, as the 2013 photo in Chihuly on Fire of two assistants in helmeted, fireproof space suits preparing to catch a still-glowing piece dramatically shows. To be clear, it’s okay to be impressed by that sort of thing, to get sucked into the spectacle that is Chihuly. After all, lots of artists have made careers of astounding viewers with physical spectacle, as anyone who has walked within the rusty, leaning walls of a curving Richard Serra can attest. In a way, though, Chihuly takes the greater aesthetic risk by being brash enough to demand that his creations are also, well, beautiful. For that, color rather than form has been his most capable collaborator. ]]>

This year for the 4th of July, I varied my routine ever so slightly by spending the day aboard the R/V Marion Dufresne outside of Sabang harbor on the island of We, which is just north of the tip of Sumatra. For more than 12 hours, from roughly 11 in the morning to almost half past 11 at night, we waited and waited, and waited some more, as the local Indonesian immigration and port officials did whatever it was they needed to do to release eight of their fellow citizens into our care. As you can see, I took a few snapshots of the little islands that fringe the marginally larger island of We, but we were not permitted to go ashore.

The following morning, the mystery of our delay was partially explained. As I understand it, the local Sabang authorities had wanted to send our new passengers’ passports to Jakarta for approval, which would have delayed our expedition by days. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, the passports were returned, and we were allowed to proceed south.

Most of the new members of our crew are Indonesian students studying geophysics and other sciences related to our survey of a seismically active section of the Wharton Basin, which is 3 kilometers below the surface of the Indian Ocean. Also aboard are a couple of Indonesian scientists, as well as an Indonesian security officer, who’s a captain in the Indonesian Navy and has been empowered to approve any changes to the expedition plan that’s already been approved by the Indonesian government. Should a question about that arise in the Wharton Basin, at least his answer will be a simple “yes” or “no,” with no need to trouble anyone in Sumatra for confirmation.

This year for the 4th of July, I varied my routine ever so slightly by spending the day aboard the R/V Marion Dufresne outside of Sabang harbor on the island of We, which is just north of the tip of Sumatra. For more than 12 hours, from roughly 11 in the morning to almost half past 11 at night, we waited and waited, and waited some more, as the local Indonesian immigration and port officials did whatever it was they needed to do to release eight of their fellow citizens into our care. As you can see, I took a few snapshots of the little islands that fringe the marginally larger island of We, but we were not permitted to go ashore.

The following morning, the mystery of our delay was partially explained. As I understand it, the local Sabang authorities had wanted to send our new passengers’ passports to Jakarta for approval, which would have delayed our expedition by days. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, the passports were returned, and we were allowed to proceed south.

Most of the new members of our crew are Indonesian students studying geophysics and other sciences related to our survey of a seismically active section of the Wharton Basin, which is 3 kilometers below the surface of the Indian Ocean. Also aboard are a couple of Indonesian scientists, as well as an Indonesian security officer, who’s a captain in the Indonesian Navy and has been empowered to approve any changes to the expedition plan that’s already been approved by the Indonesian government. Should a question about that arise in the Wharton Basin, at least his answer will be a simple “yes” or “no,” with no need to trouble anyone in Sumatra for confirmation.

On April 11, 2012, a magnitude-8.6 earthquake, followed a few hours later by a magnitude-8.2, struck the Wharton Basin, which lies approximately five kilometers below the surface of the Indian Ocean, and some 500 kilometers southwest of the tip of Sumatra. Unlike the magnitude 9.2 earthquake of 2004, whose epicenter was in the volatile subduction zone just off the western coast of Sumatra, the Great Earthquake of 2012, as it’s come to be called, did not trigger devastating tsunamis resulting in the loss of thousands of lives. That may be because its epicenter was well within the Indo-Australian plate, at a depth of 50 kilometers. Even so, the Great Earthquake of 2012 is of keen interest to scientists—at magnitude-8.6, it is the largest intraplate earthquake ever recorded.

During the month of July, I get to accompany an international group of scientists and students on an expedition dubbed MIRAGE, which stands for “Marine Investigation of the Rupture Anatomy of the 2012 Great Earthquake.” Composed of representatives from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), the group’s collective task is to acquire bathymetry (i.e., to map the seafloor and its sub-surface) in the section of the Wharton Basin directly above and around the epicenter of the 2012 magnitude-8.6 earthquake. My job is to write about their work for EOS's blog. #MIRAGEcruise.

I’ll also be posting at Boing Boing from time to time, to give this site’s readers a heads up on what’s been posted at EOS, as well as to share some of my photos and impressions of the trip. For example, yes, if you must know, I did get seasick the first morning and afternoon, but it’s been smooth sailing ever since. Also, we’ve been told to keep an eye out for pirates, but I have to say that compared to the noisy hype leading up to the nominating conventions and being bombarded by Donald’s bombast 24/7, a potential pirate attack is preferable. And that’s my first impression of being out here in the middle of the Indian Ocean: A month ago, like just about everybody else I know in the States, I was consumed by each fresh outrage, each new poll. Over the last few days, though, I’m up at dawn to watch the sunrise, and back up on “I” deck to watch it go down. That may get old as the weeks wear on, but right now it’s difficult to imagine how…

To follow the progress of MIRAGE, visit the EOS blog. #MIRAGEcruise
[caption id="attachment_470942" align="alignnone" width="800"] Cranes on the bow of the R/V Marion Dufresne, in Colombo harbor[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470941" align="alignnone" width="800"] At 120 meters long, the Marion Dufresne is the largest research vessel in the French fleet. Here it is at the dock in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where our voyage began.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470947" align="alignnone" width="800"] As we left Colombo harbor early in the morning, we passed numerous small boats coming in from the fishing grounds.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470944" align="alignnone" width="800"] Before I left the United States, I worried that my cabin on the ship would resemble [caption id="attachment_470948" align="alignnone" width="800"] MIRAGE scientists Helen Carton (left), Jerome Dyment (and), and Nugroho Hananto (right) prepare the log book to record the bathymetry, a manual double-check on electronic data collection.[/caption]the inside of a sardine can, but it is actually quite spacious and comfortable.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470943" align="alignnone" width="800"] MIRAGE scientists Helen Carton (left), Jerome Dyment (and), and Nugroho Hananto (right) prepare the log book to record the bathymetry, a manual double-check on electronic data collection.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470946" align="alignnone" width="800"] Sunset, July 1, 2016, east of Sri Lanka[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470945" align="alignnone" width="800"] Sunset, July 1, 2016, east of Sri Lanka.[/caption]
]]>

On April 11, 2012, a magnitude-8.6 earthquake, followed a few hours later by a magnitude-8.2, struck the Wharton Basin, which lies approximately five kilometers below the surface of the Indian Ocean, and some 500 kilometers southwest of the tip of Sumatra. Unlike the magnitude 9.2 earthquake of 2004, whose epicenter was in the volatile subduction zone just off the western coast of Sumatra, the Great Earthquake of 2012, as it’s come to be called, did not trigger devastating tsunamis resulting in the loss of thousands of lives. That may be because its epicenter was well within the Indo-Australian plate, at a depth of 50 kilometers. Even so, the Great Earthquake of 2012 is of keen interest to scientists—at magnitude-8.6, it is the largest intraplate earthquake ever recorded.

During the month of July, I get to accompany an international group of scientists and students on an expedition dubbed MIRAGE, which stands for “Marine Investigation of the Rupture Anatomy of the 2012 Great Earthquake.” Composed of representatives from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), the group’s collective task is to acquire bathymetry (i.e., to map the seafloor and its sub-surface) in the section of the Wharton Basin directly above and around the epicenter of the 2012 magnitude-8.6 earthquake. My job is to write about their work for EOS's blog. #MIRAGEcruise.

I’ll also be posting at Boing Boing from time to time, to give this site’s readers a heads up on what’s been posted at EOS, as well as to share some of my photos and impressions of the trip. For example, yes, if you must know, I did get seasick the first morning and afternoon, but it’s been smooth sailing ever since. Also, we’ve been told to keep an eye out for pirates, but I have to say that compared to the noisy hype leading up to the nominating conventions and being bombarded by Donald’s bombast 24/7, a potential pirate attack is preferable. And that’s my first impression of being out here in the middle of the Indian Ocean: A month ago, like just about everybody else I know in the States, I was consumed by each fresh outrage, each new poll. Over the last few days, though, I’m up at dawn to watch the sunrise, and back up on “I” deck to watch it go down. That may get old as the weeks wear on, but right now it’s difficult to imagine how…

To follow the progress of MIRAGE, visit the EOS blog. #MIRAGEcruise
[caption id="attachment_470942" align="alignnone" width="800"] Cranes on the bow of the R/V Marion Dufresne, in Colombo harbor[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470941" align="alignnone" width="800"] At 120 meters long, the Marion Dufresne is the largest research vessel in the French fleet. Here it is at the dock in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where our voyage began.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470947" align="alignnone" width="800"] As we left Colombo harbor early in the morning, we passed numerous small boats coming in from the fishing grounds.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470944" align="alignnone" width="800"] Before I left the United States, I worried that my cabin on the ship would resemble [caption id="attachment_470948" align="alignnone" width="800"] MIRAGE scientists Helen Carton (left), Jerome Dyment (and), and Nugroho Hananto (right) prepare the log book to record the bathymetry, a manual double-check on electronic data collection.[/caption]the inside of a sardine can, but it is actually quite spacious and comfortable.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470943" align="alignnone" width="800"] MIRAGE scientists Helen Carton (left), Jerome Dyment (and), and Nugroho Hananto (right) prepare the log book to record the bathymetry, a manual double-check on electronic data collection.[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470946" align="alignnone" width="800"] Sunset, July 1, 2016, east of Sri Lanka[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_470945" align="alignnone" width="800"] Sunset, July 1, 2016, east of Sri Lanka.[/caption]
]]>

Lisa Hix of has written a lengthy piece for Collectors Weekly on the Oneida Community of the late 19th century, and how it morphed from a group of men and women who "believed the liquid electricity of Jesus Christ’s spirit flowed through words and touch, and that a chain of sexual intercourse would create a spiritual battery so charged with God’s energy that the community would transcend into immortality, creating heaven on earth," to a company that was famous for its flatware.

Lisa Hix of has written a lengthy piece for Collectors Weekly on the Oneida Community of the late 19th century, and how it morphed from a group of men and women who "believed the liquid electricity of Jesus Christ’s spirit flowed through words and touch, and that a chain of sexual intercourse would create a spiritual battery so charged with God’s energy that the community would transcend into immortality, creating heaven on earth," to a company that was famous for its flatware.

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I briefly washed dishes and carried equipment for a light show called Garden of Delights, which was based in Sausalito, California. So it was a dream come true to interview Bill Ham, the artist behind the first light shows in 1966 at San Francisco's fabled Avalon Ballroom. Over the course of three mornings and afternoons, I spoke with Bill about how he got into light shows, the techniques that evolved from his early experiments with Elias Romero, the reactions of musicians to his work, and his years in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s, which included a stay at a French chateau with the Grateful Dead. Highlights from those conversations, clocking in at 9,000 or so words, have now been published at Collectors Weekly.

Here's a snip:

Collectors Weekly: Can you describe the techniques you were using at that time?

Ham: It started with the overhead projectors, which had been designed for lectures and presentations, so that lecturers could show their audiences diagrams, text, and other information as they spoke. Overhead projectors were used mostly in educational settings, for corporate meetings, that sort of thing. We repurposed them.

The main medium of the overhead projector had been the transparency. The light source below the projector’s flat surface, which is actually a Fresnel lens, would beam the image or words on the transparency onto a mirror above, which, in turn, aimed that image through a focusing lens and onto a screen or wall. Transparencies are dry, but we were projecting liquids, so the first things we needed to do were to protect the lens with a clear sheet of glass and then contain the liquids.

Early on, Elias had discovered that clock crystals -- the clear pieces of glass that protect a clock’s hands and other moving parts -- made good bowls for light-show liquids. They came in all shapes and sizes. Those that were deeply concave held more liquid. Others were flatter, which allowed you to do different things to the liquids. Some crystals with round bottoms could actually be spun in circles on the projector’s flat surface. And then, by setting one bowl on top of another, you could stack them up, several at a time, to produce even more effects, liquid- and color-wise.

Whatever the effect, the overhead projector was the only tool a light-show artist could use that let him actively direct the form and composition of the projection. Slide and film projectors were also used in light shows, but only the overhead projector allowed the artist to work directly with his liquid materials in a way that was truly spontaneous.

]]>

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I briefly washed dishes and carried equipment for a light show called Garden of Delights, which was based in Sausalito, California. So it was a dream come true to interview Bill Ham, the artist behind the first light shows in 1966 at San Francisco's fabled Avalon Ballroom. Over the course of three mornings and afternoons, I spoke with Bill about how he got into light shows, the techniques that evolved from his early experiments with Elias Romero, the reactions of musicians to his work, and his years in Europe at the beginning of the 1970s, which included a stay at a French chateau with the Grateful Dead. Highlights from those conversations, clocking in at 9,000 or so words, have now been published at Collectors Weekly.

Here's a snip:

Collectors Weekly: Can you describe the techniques you were using at that time?

Ham: It started with the overhead projectors, which had been designed for lectures and presentations, so that lecturers could show their audiences diagrams, text, and other information as they spoke. Overhead projectors were used mostly in educational settings, for corporate meetings, that sort of thing. We repurposed them.

The main medium of the overhead projector had been the transparency. The light source below the projector’s flat surface, which is actually a Fresnel lens, would beam the image or words on the transparency onto a mirror above, which, in turn, aimed that image through a focusing lens and onto a screen or wall. Transparencies are dry, but we were projecting liquids, so the first things we needed to do were to protect the lens with a clear sheet of glass and then contain the liquids.

Early on, Elias had discovered that clock crystals -- the clear pieces of glass that protect a clock’s hands and other moving parts -- made good bowls for light-show liquids. They came in all shapes and sizes. Those that were deeply concave held more liquid. Others were flatter, which allowed you to do different things to the liquids. Some crystals with round bottoms could actually be spun in circles on the projector’s flat surface. And then, by setting one bowl on top of another, you could stack them up, several at a time, to produce even more effects, liquid- and color-wise.

Whatever the effect, the overhead projector was the only tool a light-show artist could use that let him actively direct the form and composition of the projection. Slide and film projectors were also used in light shows, but only the overhead projector allowed the artist to work directly with his liquid materials in a way that was truly spontaneous.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2016/06/22/lightman-fantastic-this-artis.html/feed2468304GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Humanhttp://boingboing.net/2016/05/17/goatman-how-i-took-a-holiday.html
http://boingboing.net/2016/05/17/goatman-how-i-took-a-holiday.html#commentsTue, 17 May 2016 18:52:10 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=462307

Thomas Thwaites has a curious idea of what it means to take a vacation, at least if the just released GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human is any indication. What started off as a casual observation about how Queen Elizabeth’s dog, Noggin, probably worries a good deal less than his royal master evolved into a quixotic book full of ruminations on ruminants. Animals, Thwaites imagined, live in the moment, free from worry, at one with the land. How wonderful to be so unburdened, he thought. So, after briefly considering becoming an elephant, he decided to try his hand at being a goat.

Along the way, Thwaites learned a good deal about goats. Humans, Thwaites tells us, have been interacting with them since 9000 BCE – from the domestication of bezoar goats somewhere in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains to the mythical, sexual subjugation of goats by the goat-horned, Greek god Pan, as depicted in a rather graphic sculpture discovered under layers of ash deposited on the city of Herculaneum by Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. Much to our relief, Thwaites just wants to be a goat, not to “do” one.

Which is not to say the book is not occasionally disgusting. The section describing the R&D behind his goat suit includes the dissection of a goat named Venus, who died of natural causes and whose skinned limbs, palm-sized brain, and oozing guts are explored in gory detail. I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that in the end, Thwaites gets his opportunity to clomp about on all fours on the steep hillsides of Switzerland, where he hangs out with a herd of Swiss goats and does what goats do – he grazes. For the record, the green-green grass, he reports, is sweeter than the blue-green stuff, which is bitter. Later, Thwaites makes a meal of the grass he’d been chewing and spitting into an artificial goat stomach, using decidedly non-goat cooking techniques to make it digestible for his human digestive system. The resulting “burnt grass stew,” he confesses, was the “most unappetising meal of my life.” Perhaps, though, if Thwaites had simply spent a few days hiking on two legs instead of four in this beautiful place, he would have had fewer goat concerns on his human mind.

Thomas Thwaites has a curious idea of what it means to take a vacation, at least if the just released GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human is any indication. What started off as a casual observation about how Queen Elizabeth’s dog, Noggin, probably worries a good deal less than his royal master evolved into a quixotic book full of ruminations on ruminants. Animals, Thwaites imagined, live in the moment, free from worry, at one with the land. How wonderful to be so unburdened, he thought. So, after briefly considering becoming an elephant, he decided to try his hand at being a goat.

Along the way, Thwaites learned a good deal about goats. Humans, Thwaites tells us, have been interacting with them since 9000 BCE – from the domestication of bezoar goats somewhere in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains to the mythical, sexual subjugation of goats by the goat-horned, Greek god Pan, as depicted in a rather graphic sculpture discovered under layers of ash deposited on the city of Herculaneum by Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. Much to our relief, Thwaites just wants to be a goat, not to “do” one.

Which is not to say the book is not occasionally disgusting. The section describing the R&D behind his goat suit includes the dissection of a goat named Venus, who died of natural causes and whose skinned limbs, palm-sized brain, and oozing guts are explored in gory detail. I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that in the end, Thwaites gets his opportunity to clomp about on all fours on the steep hillsides of Switzerland, where he hangs out with a herd of Swiss goats and does what goats do – he grazes. For the record, the green-green grass, he reports, is sweeter than the blue-green stuff, which is bitter. Later, Thwaites makes a meal of the grass he’d been chewing and spitting into an artificial goat stomach, using decidedly non-goat cooking techniques to make it digestible for his human digestive system. The resulting “burnt grass stew,” he confesses, was the “most unappetising meal of my life.” Perhaps, though, if Thwaites had simply spent a few days hiking on two legs instead of four in this beautiful place, he would have had fewer goat concerns on his human mind.

]]>

http://boingboing.net/2016/05/17/goatman-how-i-took-a-holiday.html/feed13462307Railway Paradise: How a Fine-Dining Empire Made the Southwest Palatable to Outsidershttp://boingboing.net/2016/05/11/railway-paradise-how-a-fine-d.html
http://boingboing.net/2016/05/11/railway-paradise-how-a-fine-d.html#commentsWed, 11 May 2016 18:14:39 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=461446

Who were the Harvey Girls, and what were the Harvey Houses in which they worked? It's actually more innocent than it sounds, as Hunter Oatman-Stanford explains in his latest piece at Collectors Weekly. The Harvey Houses were a series of eateries and hotels run by a British ex-pat named Fred Harvey alongside the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad tracks that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. The Girls were women from the East Coast and Midwest, imported to replace the local, often uncouth male waiters in towns like Raton and Belen, New Mexico. Together, the Girls and the dining establishments they worked in lent an air of respectability to the still-wild American Southwest at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as Hunter learned when he spoke to Richard Melzer, author of Fred Harvey Houses of the Southwest.

In 1883, Harvey had decided to fire the rowdy male waiters at his restaurant in Raton, New Mexico, and hire respectable young women in their place. Customers responded so positively to the female staff that Harvey began replacing all of his company’s male servers, advertising for women employees in newspapers throughout the Midwestern and Eastern states.

Unlike much of the Eastern United States, in small Western outposts, it was acceptable for single young women to work and live away from their parents — though they were often stigmatized as being prostitutes or sexually promiscuous. “The Harvey Company called its servers ‘Harvey Girls’ — not waitresses — because the term waitress had a bad connotation: It was linked to the saloon girls,” who were viewed as bawdy and indecent, Melzer says. “Fred Harvey didn’t want customers thinking there were saloon girls at his restaurants, and he certainly couldn’t recruit respectable women to work there if they thought they’d be working in a saloon-like atmosphere.” To ensure there’d be no confusion, the Harvey Girls were always attired in a conservative black-and-white uniform, just one of many strict job requirements.

Harvey had no trouble finding suitable young women, despite the perception that the Wild West would scare them off. In fact, many women jumped at the opportunity for economic independence, adventure, and travel in an era when their prospects were greatly limited. “A lot of them came for the chance to see a different part of the country,” Melzer says. “After six months at a Harvey House, you could be transferred, so even if you started in a small place like Belen, New Mexico, you might eventually get to Santa Fe or to the Grand Canyon. Others came for the money, hoping to send it home to their families, save for their education, or maybe open a business themselves someday.”

However, many took jobs with the Fred Harvey Company for a more traditional reason: The high ratio of single men to single women meant they had great prospects for meeting potential husbands. Yet even with such a goal in mind, women who moved west were often required to step out of their traditional roles simply to survive.

]]>

Who were the Harvey Girls, and what were the Harvey Houses in which they worked? It's actually more innocent than it sounds, as Hunter Oatman-Stanford explains in his latest piece at Collectors Weekly. The Harvey Houses were a series of eateries and hotels run by a British ex-pat named Fred Harvey alongside the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad tracks that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. The Girls were women from the East Coast and Midwest, imported to replace the local, often uncouth male waiters in towns like Raton and Belen, New Mexico. Together, the Girls and the dining establishments they worked in lent an air of respectability to the still-wild American Southwest at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as Hunter learned when he spoke to Richard Melzer, author of Fred Harvey Houses of the Southwest.

In 1883, Harvey had decided to fire the rowdy male waiters at his restaurant in Raton, New Mexico, and hire respectable young women in their place. Customers responded so positively to the female staff that Harvey began replacing all of his company’s male servers, advertising for women employees in newspapers throughout the Midwestern and Eastern states.

Unlike much of the Eastern United States, in small Western outposts, it was acceptable for single young women to work and live away from their parents — though they were often stigmatized as being prostitutes or sexually promiscuous. “The Harvey Company called its servers ‘Harvey Girls’ — not waitresses — because the term waitress had a bad connotation: It was linked to the saloon girls,” who were viewed as bawdy and indecent, Melzer says. “Fred Harvey didn’t want customers thinking there were saloon girls at his restaurants, and he certainly couldn’t recruit respectable women to work there if they thought they’d be working in a saloon-like atmosphere.” To ensure there’d be no confusion, the Harvey Girls were always attired in a conservative black-and-white uniform, just one of many strict job requirements.

Harvey had no trouble finding suitable young women, despite the perception that the Wild West would scare them off. In fact, many women jumped at the opportunity for economic independence, adventure, and travel in an era when their prospects were greatly limited. “A lot of them came for the chance to see a different part of the country,” Melzer says. “After six months at a Harvey House, you could be transferred, so even if you started in a small place like Belen, New Mexico, you might eventually get to Santa Fe or to the Grand Canyon. Others came for the money, hoping to send it home to their families, save for their education, or maybe open a business themselves someday.”

However, many took jobs with the Fred Harvey Company for a more traditional reason: The high ratio of single men to single women meant they had great prospects for meeting potential husbands. Yet even with such a goal in mind, women who moved west were often required to step out of their traditional roles simply to survive.

About four months ago, cigar boxes, matchbooks, and coffee tins bearing the name and likeness of 19th-century poet Walt Whitman began appearing on the Show & Tell section of Collectors Weekly. Turns out, as Lisa Hix learned when she spoke to Ed Centeno, who posted the items from his personal collection, Whitman's name and bearded visage were once used to sell everything from tobacco products and booze to apple sauce. For the record, Whitman did not smoke, and as the son of an alcoholic father, he argued on behalf of Temperance causes. Presumably, Whitman ate apple sauce, but marketers never asked his permission to to sell stuff when he was alive (1819-1892), nor was Whitman ever compensated for the use of his good name.

All this advertising attention to Whitman is curious since, in general, poets don't make good marketing tools. The Whitman name is particularly problematic. While some people are inspired by his steadfast support of the Union cause during the Civil War, imperiling his own health to work as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., Army hospital, others see him as a very early champion of gay identity, as well as a hell of an erotic writer. Being patriotic and gay are obviously not incompatible, but the latter often gives those who would make money off the former pause.

Here's a snip:

During the Gilded Age, new industrial technology, particularly in chromolithography and tin-stamping, caused an explosion in product branding and advertising with colorful product labels, tin boxes, and tin signs. This new era of marketing meant familiar literary characters and beloved authors could be used to drum up excitement for an unknown products.

So when cigar maker Frank Hartmann bought the Spark Cigar Factory in Camden, New Jersey, in the late 1880s, the celebrated local bard was an obvious mascot. By 1890, his company introduced its Walt Whitman brand of cigars. But Hartmann wasn’t the only entrepreneur to have this idea: At least a few companies in the cigar manufacturing center of Binghamton, New York, started offering their own Walt Whitman cigars around the same time. The branding arrived as Whitman was facing his mortality and doubting whether Americans were truly touched by his life’s work. When Whitman disciple Horace Traubel presented the poet with an 1890 envelope advertising Walt Whitman cigars, he reported that Whitman exclaimed, “That is fame! … It is not so bad—not as bad as it might be: give the hat a little more height and it would not be such an offense.”

]]>

About four months ago, cigar boxes, matchbooks, and coffee tins bearing the name and likeness of 19th-century poet Walt Whitman began appearing on the Show & Tell section of Collectors Weekly. Turns out, as Lisa Hix learned when she spoke to Ed Centeno, who posted the items from his personal collection, Whitman's name and bearded visage were once used to sell everything from tobacco products and booze to apple sauce. For the record, Whitman did not smoke, and as the son of an alcoholic father, he argued on behalf of Temperance causes. Presumably, Whitman ate apple sauce, but marketers never asked his permission to to sell stuff when he was alive (1819-1892), nor was Whitman ever compensated for the use of his good name.

All this advertising attention to Whitman is curious since, in general, poets don't make good marketing tools. The Whitman name is particularly problematic. While some people are inspired by his steadfast support of the Union cause during the Civil War, imperiling his own health to work as a nurse in a Washington, D.C., Army hospital, others see him as a very early champion of gay identity, as well as a hell of an erotic writer. Being patriotic and gay are obviously not incompatible, but the latter often gives those who would make money off the former pause.

Here's a snip:

During the Gilded Age, new industrial technology, particularly in chromolithography and tin-stamping, caused an explosion in product branding and advertising with colorful product labels, tin boxes, and tin signs. This new era of marketing meant familiar literary characters and beloved authors could be used to drum up excitement for an unknown products.

So when cigar maker Frank Hartmann bought the Spark Cigar Factory in Camden, New Jersey, in the late 1880s, the celebrated local bard was an obvious mascot. By 1890, his company introduced its Walt Whitman brand of cigars. But Hartmann wasn’t the only entrepreneur to have this idea: At least a few companies in the cigar manufacturing center of Binghamton, New York, started offering their own Walt Whitman cigars around the same time. The branding arrived as Whitman was facing his mortality and doubting whether Americans were truly touched by his life’s work. When Whitman disciple Horace Traubel presented the poet with an 1890 envelope advertising Walt Whitman cigars, he reported that Whitman exclaimed, “That is fame! … It is not so bad—not as bad as it might be: give the hat a little more height and it would not be such an offense.”

In honor of Record Store Day, I got on the phone with Russ Solomon, who founded Tower Records in the early 1960s — the late-great chain was also the subject last fall of a terrific documentary by Colin Hanks called "All Things Must Pass." In speaking with Russ, and then my son Tom, age 25, about their recollections of Tower, it became clear that how one feels about the place, which meant a great deal to me, is purely generational. To that end, I interviewed both Tom and Russ, as well as Tower's former COO, Stan Goman.

Napster, as Hanks’ film makes clear, was not even the biggest factor [in Tower's demise]. Sure, it allowed people to get music for free, but it would not have been so attractive to consumers if the record companies, with the complicity of chains like Tower, had not insisted on keeping the prices of CDs high and discontinuing the practice of selling singles, which is what music consumers had been buying since Russ and Clayton Solomon sold their customers used 3-cent 78s for a dime.

“The 78,” Solomon says, “which morphed into the 45 in the 1950s, was really the lifeblood of the record business. It was all about singles. When the record companies decided not to make singles anymore, I think that was the beginning of the downfall of the industry. They were taking away what the kids really wanted by forcing them to buy an album. That was a big mistake.”

“To me,” says my son Tom, “one of the cooler parts of the documentary was seeing how the market changed. For a while, Tower sold singles and LPs, then singles on cassette, and then the record companies got greedy, didn’t sell many singles as CDs, and raised the price of CDs. So, when MP3s came along, you could suddenly get singles again. The greed of the record companies probably had the biggest impact on encouraging music piracy. You’ll notice that today the market is all about singles.” On this, Russ Solomon and no less an authority than former record producer David Geffen, who is also interviewed for Hanks’ film, wholeheartedly agree.

Tower’s unchecked expansion and the record industry’s greed were self-inflicted wounds, but there was a third factor other than Napster that helps explain why Tower went broke—competition. One of the characteristics of CDs is that they are smaller than LPs, which means you can put more of them in the same amount of space in a store. And as “Thriller” had shown, hits lured people into stores. To put it simply, consumer-electronics retailers, and even big-box chains like Walmart and Target, decided they wanted a piece of this action.

“Walmart and Target didn’t sell enough to bother us,” Solomon corrects me. “But Best Buy did. They sold CDs, videos, and video games to draw people into their stores to look at their electronics and televisions.”

And they were selling those CDs dirt cheap. “We were paying, say, $10.40 for a CD,” Solomon continues. “Well, we could sell anything in the Top 40 list for $11.98 and not be hurt particularly because we sold a lot of them. But they were selling everything for $11.98. In contrast, we were up around $15, or something like that, for most of our stock. It was really hard to compete against that. We had a bigger selection, but they had enough, and that sucked away a lot of our business.”

Finally, then, there was Napster. “I think I first became aware of Napster when we had the store in Boston—a great store, I might add,” Solomon says. “It became a kind of a worry, but a worry you didn’t bother with. The record companies were more hysterical about it than we were, and they had good reason to be. The whole industry was in confusion when it started, but I don’t think we were really affected by it. We had so many other problems—overexpansion, what have you.”

Stan Goman takes the impact of Napster on Tower more personally than his former boss. “Napster? I didn’t get that. To me, it was just stealing. And that’s the reason there’s no real record business anymore, because you can’t compete against stolen items. I hope Mr. Napster, whoever that asshole is, is happy, because he put a lot of people out of work.”

]]>

In honor of Record Store Day, I got on the phone with Russ Solomon, who founded Tower Records in the early 1960s — the late-great chain was also the subject last fall of a terrific documentary by Colin Hanks called "All Things Must Pass." In speaking with Russ, and then my son Tom, age 25, about their recollections of Tower, it became clear that how one feels about the place, which meant a great deal to me, is purely generational. To that end, I interviewed both Tom and Russ, as well as Tower's former COO, Stan Goman.

Napster, as Hanks’ film makes clear, was not even the biggest factor [in Tower's demise]. Sure, it allowed people to get music for free, but it would not have been so attractive to consumers if the record companies, with the complicity of chains like Tower, had not insisted on keeping the prices of CDs high and discontinuing the practice of selling singles, which is what music consumers had been buying since Russ and Clayton Solomon sold their customers used 3-cent 78s for a dime.

“The 78,” Solomon says, “which morphed into the 45 in the 1950s, was really the lifeblood of the record business. It was all about singles. When the record companies decided not to make singles anymore, I think that was the beginning of the downfall of the industry. They were taking away what the kids really wanted by forcing them to buy an album. That was a big mistake.”

“To me,” says my son Tom, “one of the cooler parts of the documentary was seeing how the market changed. For a while, Tower sold singles and LPs, then singles on cassette, and then the record companies got greedy, didn’t sell many singles as CDs, and raised the price of CDs. So, when MP3s came along, you could suddenly get singles again. The greed of the record companies probably had the biggest impact on encouraging music piracy. You’ll notice that today the market is all about singles.” On this, Russ Solomon and no less an authority than former record producer David Geffen, who is also interviewed for Hanks’ film, wholeheartedly agree.

Tower’s unchecked expansion and the record industry’s greed were self-inflicted wounds, but there was a third factor other than Napster that helps explain why Tower went broke—competition. One of the characteristics of CDs is that they are smaller than LPs, which means you can put more of them in the same amount of space in a store. And as “Thriller” had shown, hits lured people into stores. To put it simply, consumer-electronics retailers, and even big-box chains like Walmart and Target, decided they wanted a piece of this action.

“Walmart and Target didn’t sell enough to bother us,” Solomon corrects me. “But Best Buy did. They sold CDs, videos, and video games to draw people into their stores to look at their electronics and televisions.”

And they were selling those CDs dirt cheap. “We were paying, say, $10.40 for a CD,” Solomon continues. “Well, we could sell anything in the Top 40 list for $11.98 and not be hurt particularly because we sold a lot of them. But they were selling everything for $11.98. In contrast, we were up around $15, or something like that, for most of our stock. It was really hard to compete against that. We had a bigger selection, but they had enough, and that sucked away a lot of our business.”

Finally, then, there was Napster. “I think I first became aware of Napster when we had the store in Boston—a great store, I might add,” Solomon says. “It became a kind of a worry, but a worry you didn’t bother with. The record companies were more hysterical about it than we were, and they had good reason to be. The whole industry was in confusion when it started, but I don’t think we were really affected by it. We had so many other problems—overexpansion, what have you.”

Stan Goman takes the impact of Napster on Tower more personally than his former boss. “Napster? I didn’t get that. To me, it was just stealing. And that’s the reason there’s no real record business anymore, because you can’t compete against stolen items. I hope Mr. Napster, whoever that asshole is, is happy, because he put a lot of people out of work.”

Since April of 2013, Cory has posted frequently about Scarfolk for Boing Boing. Now, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has interviewed Richard Littler, the creator of this fictional 1970s dystopia. Even in the three years since Cory's first post, the line between Littler's fiction and our contemporary reality has gotten disturbingly blurry.

Here's a snip from Littler:

"Scarfolk is paranoid and cynical, and often touches on themes such as surveillance and the diminishment of civil rights. To a certain extent, Scarfolk is speculative because it plays with the recent political developments and either subverts them or exaggerates them to the point of absurdity, though that’s becoming difficult with people like Donald Trump and the incumbent British government. Increasingly, there are official actions and statements that come across like they’ve already been created by satirists. It’s becoming hard for us to outdo our sources!"

]]>

Since April of 2013, Cory has posted frequently about Scarfolk for Boing Boing. Now, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has interviewed Richard Littler, the creator of this fictional 1970s dystopia. Even in the three years since Cory's first post, the line between Littler's fiction and our contemporary reality has gotten disturbingly blurry.

Here's a snip from Littler:

"Scarfolk is paranoid and cynical, and often touches on themes such as surveillance and the diminishment of civil rights. To a certain extent, Scarfolk is speculative because it plays with the recent political developments and either subverts them or exaggerates them to the point of absurdity, though that’s becoming difficult with people like Donald Trump and the incumbent British government. Increasingly, there are official actions and statements that come across like they’ve already been created by satirists. It’s becoming hard for us to outdo our sources!"

Shaped like a hexagon to mimic the dimensions of a cube, Minecraft: Blockopedia is designed for full-on Minecraft geeks, although those of us who have only watched the game over the shoulders of children and loved ones will find plenty to admire here too. After the briefest of introductions and a quick glossary to help noobs make sense of the stats that accompany each block’s name, it’s off to the races, with page after page devoted to blocks made from rocks, blocks made from plants, blocks that serve particular functions (a ladder), and blocks that do particular things (acting as a switch).

One of the coolest characteristics about Minecraft is how it chooses to observe the laws of nature and physics, or ignore them. Sand, we are told, can be a cave-in hazard, but when it’s smelted in a furnace, it turns to glass. Both statements are true, but don’t go looking for glowstone the next time you’re spelunking – it is only found in a sinister dimension of Minecraft called the Nether. And while sugar cane in both the real world and the Overworld of Minecraft can be used to make sugar, guess where it can also be used to block flowing lava?

Though the format and illustrations in Minecraft: Blockopedia are the book’s most prominent features, it’s still a book filled with lots and lots of, you know, words. Writer Alex Wiltshire mostly plays it straight (“Water is incredibly useful.”), but often he lets the language and logic of Minecraft add color, as in “Sticky pistons are made by crafting a piston with a slimeball…” and “If you dig podzol without the silk touch enhancement it drops dirt.” Got that?

Shaped like a hexagon to mimic the dimensions of a cube, Minecraft: Blockopedia is designed for full-on Minecraft geeks, although those of us who have only watched the game over the shoulders of children and loved ones will find plenty to admire here too. After the briefest of introductions and a quick glossary to help noobs make sense of the stats that accompany each block’s name, it’s off to the races, with page after page devoted to blocks made from rocks, blocks made from plants, blocks that serve particular functions (a ladder), and blocks that do particular things (acting as a switch).

One of the coolest characteristics about Minecraft is how it chooses to observe the laws of nature and physics, or ignore them. Sand, we are told, can be a cave-in hazard, but when it’s smelted in a furnace, it turns to glass. Both statements are true, but don’t go looking for glowstone the next time you’re spelunking – it is only found in a sinister dimension of Minecraft called the Nether. And while sugar cane in both the real world and the Overworld of Minecraft can be used to make sugar, guess where it can also be used to block flowing lava?

Though the format and illustrations in Minecraft: Blockopedia are the book’s most prominent features, it’s still a book filled with lots and lots of, you know, words. Writer Alex Wiltshire mostly plays it straight (“Water is incredibly useful.”), but often he lets the language and logic of Minecraft add color, as in “Sticky pistons are made by crafting a piston with a slimeball…” and “If you dig podzol without the silk touch enhancement it drops dirt.” Got that?

When most of us gaze upon an eight-place setting of fine porcelain china or a curvaceous ceramic vase, we see exactly that, but when Jim Robinson of Rookwood Pottery looks at such objects, he sees rocks, as I learned recently when I interviewed Robinson about his role as the venerable art pottery firm's glaze chemist.

His interest in rocks and geology came early. “When I was in high school in 1967,” he says, “I had a great professor, Richard Tremblay, who got into plate tectonics just as it was emerging. He explained to us how the surface of the planet was skidding around, powered by these upwellings of magma, and how when two plates encountered each other, one went down into the subduction zone and the other sprouted mountains. Well, I came seriously unglued when I heard that, and I’ve been reading about rocks and geology ever since.”

To put it mildly, this love of rocks and minerals has completely colored Robinson’s world. “I’m looking out a window now at a brick building,” he tells me as we are chatting over the phone. “Every brick building is made out of different clays. Some are kind of taupe gray. Some are really deep rust. Every brick is different because each comes out of a different hole in the ground. That just blows my mind.” More particularly, Robinson’s romance with stone has had a profound impact on his work as a ceramist. “Once you get an image in your mind of the earth and how active it is,” he says, “you start to put two and two together. You think, ‘That’s where the minerals are.’”

One mineral Robinson knows well is feldspar, two of whose alkalis, potash and soda, are common ingredients in clay. Potash and soda are easy to find, their ubiquity nothing more—or less—than the product of deep time. “The reason why a clay industry developed here in the Midwest is in large part because of the Appalachian Mountains,” Robinson begins. “When feldspar weathers, it turns into kaolin, the stuff porcelain is made of. The potash, soda, and calcium that’s locked up in the feldspar erodes out, running all the way to the sea—that’s why the sea is salty. However, the clay ingredients—minerals like pyrophyllite and silica—settle in places like Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. It’s the coolest damn thing.”

]]>

When most of us gaze upon an eight-place setting of fine porcelain china or a curvaceous ceramic vase, we see exactly that, but when Jim Robinson of Rookwood Pottery looks at such objects, he sees rocks, as I learned recently when I interviewed Robinson about his role as the venerable art pottery firm's glaze chemist.

His interest in rocks and geology came early. “When I was in high school in 1967,” he says, “I had a great professor, Richard Tremblay, who got into plate tectonics just as it was emerging. He explained to us how the surface of the planet was skidding around, powered by these upwellings of magma, and how when two plates encountered each other, one went down into the subduction zone and the other sprouted mountains. Well, I came seriously unglued when I heard that, and I’ve been reading about rocks and geology ever since.”

To put it mildly, this love of rocks and minerals has completely colored Robinson’s world. “I’m looking out a window now at a brick building,” he tells me as we are chatting over the phone. “Every brick building is made out of different clays. Some are kind of taupe gray. Some are really deep rust. Every brick is different because each comes out of a different hole in the ground. That just blows my mind.” More particularly, Robinson’s romance with stone has had a profound impact on his work as a ceramist. “Once you get an image in your mind of the earth and how active it is,” he says, “you start to put two and two together. You think, ‘That’s where the minerals are.’”

One mineral Robinson knows well is feldspar, two of whose alkalis, potash and soda, are common ingredients in clay. Potash and soda are easy to find, their ubiquity nothing more—or less—than the product of deep time. “The reason why a clay industry developed here in the Midwest is in large part because of the Appalachian Mountains,” Robinson begins. “When feldspar weathers, it turns into kaolin, the stuff porcelain is made of. The potash, soda, and calcium that’s locked up in the feldspar erodes out, running all the way to the sea—that’s why the sea is salty. However, the clay ingredients—minerals like pyrophyllite and silica—settle in places like Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. It’s the coolest damn thing.”

When most people think of professional cycling today, the name Lance Armstrong probably still comes to mind. Between 1999 and 2005, Armstrong won a record seven Tours de France, only to have them all tossed out in 2012 after it was revealed the Texan had been using performance-enhancing drugs. Between 1957 and 1964, a Frenchman named Jacques Anquetil won five Tours, also – by his own repeated admission at the time – on drugs. But the trait shared by Armstrong and Anquetil that interests authors Shelly and Brett Horton in Shoulder to Shoulder: Bicycle Racing in the Age of Anquetil is not doping but celebrity. Forget Armstrong (in their book, the Hortons do just that): What John F. Kennedy was to U.S. presidents and The Beatles were to rock ’n’ roll, Anquetil was to cycling.

Anquetil’s story, as well as that of other Anquetil-era racers like Tom Simpson of England, Federico Bahamontes of Spain, and Rik van Looy of Belgium, is told through more than 100 magazine and newspaper photos collected and restored by the Hortons. Each photo is captioned, though not sourced, and accompanied by a short note in the back of the slim volume. We learn, for example, that a 1962 photo of the driver of a support car, who’s leaning out the car’s window to drip oil on the rear gears of a cyclist’s bike during the Circuit des Boucles de la Seine, actually depicts a ruse to give the unidentified rider a chance to lean on the car’s fender for a precious few seconds. As for the photo of Rik van Looy smoking a cigarette as he pedaled during the 1961 Giro d’Italia, it makes you wonder if his pair of secondary classification and numerous stage victories in the Tour and Giro could have been parlayed into something more with healthier lungs.

These glimpses of cycling in the sixties are welcome, as are the images of the punishing circuits, the mercurial weather, and the crashes that came about as a result of both. But the book’s focus is Anquetil, which means we get to see him as a young man being served soup by his mother, Marie. There are photos of Anquetil meeting the legend who preceded him, Fausto Coppi, and the cyclist who would equal his number of Tour victories, Eddie Merckx. We see Anquetil exulting during the 1962 Tour, which he won, cruising in a motorboat with his wife, Janine, and signing the inside of a leggy blonde’s thigh in a photo clearly staged for a nearby group of photographers. It all looks impossibly romantic and dashing, which, not coincidentally, was exactly the impression the world was given of Jacques Anquetil.
– Ben Marks

When most people think of professional cycling today, the name Lance Armstrong probably still comes to mind. Between 1999 and 2005, Armstrong won a record seven Tours de France, only to have them all tossed out in 2012 after it was revealed the Texan had been using performance-enhancing drugs. Between 1957 and 1964, a Frenchman named Jacques Anquetil won five Tours, also – by his own repeated admission at the time – on drugs. But the trait shared by Armstrong and Anquetil that interests authors Shelly and Brett Horton in Shoulder to Shoulder: Bicycle Racing in the Age of Anquetil is not doping but celebrity. Forget Armstrong (in their book, the Hortons do just that): What John F. Kennedy was to U.S. presidents and The Beatles were to rock ’n’ roll, Anquetil was to cycling.

Anquetil’s story, as well as that of other Anquetil-era racers like Tom Simpson of England, Federico Bahamontes of Spain, and Rik van Looy of Belgium, is told through more than 100 magazine and newspaper photos collected and restored by the Hortons. Each photo is captioned, though not sourced, and accompanied by a short note in the back of the slim volume. We learn, for example, that a 1962 photo of the driver of a support car, who’s leaning out the car’s window to drip oil on the rear gears of a cyclist’s bike during the Circuit des Boucles de la Seine, actually depicts a ruse to give the unidentified rider a chance to lean on the car’s fender for a precious few seconds. As for the photo of Rik van Looy smoking a cigarette as he pedaled during the 1961 Giro d’Italia, it makes you wonder if his pair of secondary classification and numerous stage victories in the Tour and Giro could have been parlayed into something more with healthier lungs.

These glimpses of cycling in the sixties are welcome, as are the images of the punishing circuits, the mercurial weather, and the crashes that came about as a result of both. But the book’s focus is Anquetil, which means we get to see him as a young man being served soup by his mother, Marie. There are photos of Anquetil meeting the legend who preceded him, Fausto Coppi, and the cyclist who would equal his number of Tour victories, Eddie Merckx. We see Anquetil exulting during the 1962 Tour, which he won, cruising in a motorboat with his wife, Janine, and signing the inside of a leggy blonde’s thigh in a photo clearly staged for a nearby group of photographers. It all looks impossibly romantic and dashing, which, not coincidentally, was exactly the impression the world was given of Jacques Anquetil.
– Ben Marks

Featuring reviews of more that 160 cookbooks written by African Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries, Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code is a much-overdue look at at how African Americans really cooked over the last 200 years, as well as how caricatures of African Americans were used to sell white homemakers everything from "Pickaninny Cookies" to pancake mix. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Tipton-Martin to learn more about this heretofore malnourished chapter in America's culinary history.

Aunt Jemima the Pancake Queen became a national sensation in 1893, thanks to Davis’ ingenuous promotion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The company hired 56-year-old black actress Nancy Green to play Aunt Jemima at the fair. A former slave, Green was eager to leave behind a life of drudgery — as her other career options involved washing dishes or sweeping floors — in favor of the world of entertainment and advertising. With her warm, smiling persona, Green made pancakes, sang songs, and told nostalgic stories about the “good ol’ days” making breakfast for her plantation masters. Her pancakes were believed to be made of love and magic, not culinary artistry or domestic science.

That image of a fat, happy slave — who faithfully nurtures a white family while neglecting her own — lived on for 75 years through the Aunt Jemima Pancake line, purchased by Quaker Oats Company in 1925. Ubiquitous in ads, she promoted easy-to-make variations on pancakes, waffles, and other pastries in promotional recipe pamphlets, and an Aunt Jemima impersonator even received the keys to the city of Albion, Michigan, in 1964.

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Featuring reviews of more that 160 cookbooks written by African Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries, Toni Tipton-Martin's The Jemima Code is a much-overdue look at at how African Americans really cooked over the last 200 years, as well as how caricatures of African Americans were used to sell white homemakers everything from "Pickaninny Cookies" to pancake mix. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Tipton-Martin to learn more about this heretofore malnourished chapter in America's culinary history.

Aunt Jemima the Pancake Queen became a national sensation in 1893, thanks to Davis’ ingenuous promotion at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The company hired 56-year-old black actress Nancy Green to play Aunt Jemima at the fair. A former slave, Green was eager to leave behind a life of drudgery — as her other career options involved washing dishes or sweeping floors — in favor of the world of entertainment and advertising. With her warm, smiling persona, Green made pancakes, sang songs, and told nostalgic stories about the “good ol’ days” making breakfast for her plantation masters. Her pancakes were believed to be made of love and magic, not culinary artistry or domestic science.

That image of a fat, happy slave — who faithfully nurtures a white family while neglecting her own — lived on for 75 years through the Aunt Jemima Pancake line, purchased by Quaker Oats Company in 1925. Ubiquitous in ads, she promoted easy-to-make variations on pancakes, waffles, and other pastries in promotional recipe pamphlets, and an Aunt Jemima impersonator even received the keys to the city of Albion, Michigan, in 1964.

In my other life as a board member of The Rock Poster Society, the phrase “rock art” just about always equals “rock posters.” For Michael Gillette, though, whose beautiful Drawn in Stereo was published last fall by AMMO Books, rock art encompasses a whole lot more than concert advertisements. Oh sure, Gillette has designed his share of rock posters for bands like Saint Etienne, Colorama, and MGMT, but he’s also created animations for the Beastie Boys and My Morning Jacket, as well as portraits of musicians as diverse as Paul McCartney, Madonna, Jay-Z, and Pink for music magazines and websites like Spin, Mojo, and The Fader. Beyond the music world, his work has even appeared in the hallowed pages of The New Yorker and Esquire (every illustrator’s dream), and he’s been hired by such marquee clients as Levi’s, Nokia, and Sony, for whom he created the cover art for the vinyl version of the “American Hustle” soundtrack.

Drawn in Stereo delivers all of this prodigious output in a straightforward, unhurried manner, not unlike the artist’s work. Or so I thought until I read an anecdote in the book’s interview with Elastica’s former lead singer, Justine Frischmann. In that casual conversation between two friends, Gillette admits to having started and finished some of his deadline-driven assignments in only a day, a trick that requires finishing a wet acrylic-on-paper illustration with a hair dryer before delivering it to “a courier at the door.”

That interview, as well as the organization of the images in the book, loosely tracks Gillette’s journey from England to California, where he now lives with his wife and their two daughters, but the lack of linearity is a plus. Instead, Gillette organizes Drawn in Stereo along the stylistic choices he’s made, a few of the people he’s known, and the media he’s experimented with – and usually mastered. There’s a section on his drawings, including several from Beck’s 2006 album, “The Information,” followed by a number of moody pieces composed in Photoshop and a smattering of movie posters.

But it’s the portraits that really grab us, which shouldn’t be too surprising given the music industry’s preoccupation with personality. Foremost among these are the lovely and sad watercolors from his “Little Angels” series, which depicts fallen music idols such as Kurt Cobain, Biggie Smalls, and Amy Winehouse as children, their guileless faces seemingly lifted from nursery- or elementary-school photos taken on picture day. Later in Drawn in Stereo, we are treated to Brian Eno and David Bowie, each posing as a “Glam Songbird.” The humor of these sumptuously rendered images – Eno the “Art Rock Hopper” is perched on a microphone, Bowie the “Stardust Warbler” grips a mic stand in his talons – is as disarmingly dry as the children in “Little Angels” are tender. Who knew the world of massively commercial pop could inspire such subtlety?
– Ben Marks

In my other life as a board member of The Rock Poster Society, the phrase “rock art” just about always equals “rock posters.” For Michael Gillette, though, whose beautiful Drawn in Stereo was published last fall by AMMO Books, rock art encompasses a whole lot more than concert advertisements. Oh sure, Gillette has designed his share of rock posters for bands like Saint Etienne, Colorama, and MGMT, but he’s also created animations for the Beastie Boys and My Morning Jacket, as well as portraits of musicians as diverse as Paul McCartney, Madonna, Jay-Z, and Pink for music magazines and websites like Spin, Mojo, and The Fader. Beyond the music world, his work has even appeared in the hallowed pages of The New Yorker and Esquire (every illustrator’s dream), and he’s been hired by such marquee clients as Levi’s, Nokia, and Sony, for whom he created the cover art for the vinyl version of the “American Hustle” soundtrack.

Drawn in Stereo delivers all of this prodigious output in a straightforward, unhurried manner, not unlike the artist’s work. Or so I thought until I read an anecdote in the book’s interview with Elastica’s former lead singer, Justine Frischmann. In that casual conversation between two friends, Gillette admits to having started and finished some of his deadline-driven assignments in only a day, a trick that requires finishing a wet acrylic-on-paper illustration with a hair dryer before delivering it to “a courier at the door.”

That interview, as well as the organization of the images in the book, loosely tracks Gillette’s journey from England to California, where he now lives with his wife and their two daughters, but the lack of linearity is a plus. Instead, Gillette organizes Drawn in Stereo along the stylistic choices he’s made, a few of the people he’s known, and the media he’s experimented with – and usually mastered. There’s a section on his drawings, including several from Beck’s 2006 album, “The Information,” followed by a number of moody pieces composed in Photoshop and a smattering of movie posters.

But it’s the portraits that really grab us, which shouldn’t be too surprising given the music industry’s preoccupation with personality. Foremost among these are the lovely and sad watercolors from his “Little Angels” series, which depicts fallen music idols such as Kurt Cobain, Biggie Smalls, and Amy Winehouse as children, their guileless faces seemingly lifted from nursery- or elementary-school photos taken on picture day. Later in Drawn in Stereo, we are treated to Brian Eno and David Bowie, each posing as a “Glam Songbird.” The humor of these sumptuously rendered images – Eno the “Art Rock Hopper” is perched on a microphone, Bowie the “Stardust Warbler” grips a mic stand in his talons – is as disarmingly dry as the children in “Little Angels” are tender. Who knew the world of massively commercial pop could inspire such subtlety?
– Ben Marks

If Walt Disney gave us the definitive picture of German fairy tales such as Cinderella and Snow White, first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kay Nielsen helped the world imagine the settings and characters found in the stories of Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. The lifelong friends were inspired by the Grimms, and like the brothers, the look of the stories they had collected came to life many years after they were published in 1841. In the case of Asbjørnsen and Moe, the catalyst was a London publisher named Hodder & Stoughton, which hired Danish artist Nielsen, in 1914, to illustrate a collection of the friends’ Norwegian stories called East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

That volume is reproduced in its entirety, with a gorgeous new layout by Andy Disl, in a new slipcovered book from Taschen. Like the Hodder & Stoughton version, Nielsen’s illustrations are the book’s stars. Unlike it, the Taschen package also includes illustrated essays about Asbjørnsen and Moe’s contribution to the 19th-century’s preoccupation with “indigenous literature,” as well as an overview of Nielsen’s career, which included a stop at Walt Disney’s studio to create the artwork for the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in the 1941 animated masterpiece, Fantasia.

Nielsen’s influences ranged from the Art Nouveau fantasies of Aubrey Beardsley, which can be seen in his earliest work, to Japanese woodcuts and the Ballet Russes, which dominate East of the Sun and West of the Moon. More important than Nielsen’s influences, though, is the way he defined Nordic cool, both in terms of temperature and sensibility. In Nielsen’s world, verticality rules – it is a place filled with uniformly tall and slender people striding serenely or doing battle beneath limitless skies. Diving into the details of Nielsen’s intricate illustrations, one can almost feel the bite of the frigid air they breathe or the sting of the blades, spears, and arrows they wield. This angularity and precision are perfect foils for his thick, slow trolls, with their wide feet and fat phallic noses, giving them a look that in 1914 must have appeared truly monstrous to young and old readers alike.

East of the Sun and West of the Moonby Kay Nielsen (illustrator) and Noel Daniel (editor)
Taschen
2015, 168 pages, 9.4 x 11.7 x 0.9 inches
$26 Buy a copy on Amazon

If Walt Disney gave us the definitive picture of German fairy tales such as Cinderella and Snow White, first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kay Nielsen helped the world imagine the settings and characters found in the stories of Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. The lifelong friends were inspired by the Grimms, and like the brothers, the look of the stories they had collected came to life many years after they were published in 1841. In the case of Asbjørnsen and Moe, the catalyst was a London publisher named Hodder & Stoughton, which hired Danish artist Nielsen, in 1914, to illustrate a collection of the friends’ Norwegian stories called East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

That volume is reproduced in its entirety, with a gorgeous new layout by Andy Disl, in a new slipcovered book from Taschen. Like the Hodder & Stoughton version, Nielsen’s illustrations are the book’s stars. Unlike it, the Taschen package also includes illustrated essays about Asbjørnsen and Moe’s contribution to the 19th-century’s preoccupation with “indigenous literature,” as well as an overview of Nielsen’s career, which included a stop at Walt Disney’s studio to create the artwork for the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in the 1941 animated masterpiece, Fantasia.

Nielsen’s influences ranged from the Art Nouveau fantasies of Aubrey Beardsley, which can be seen in his earliest work, to Japanese woodcuts and the Ballet Russes, which dominate East of the Sun and West of the Moon. More important than Nielsen’s influences, though, is the way he defined Nordic cool, both in terms of temperature and sensibility. In Nielsen’s world, verticality rules – it is a place filled with uniformly tall and slender people striding serenely or doing battle beneath limitless skies. Diving into the details of Nielsen’s intricate illustrations, one can almost feel the bite of the frigid air they breathe or the sting of the blades, spears, and arrows they wield. This angularity and precision are perfect foils for his thick, slow trolls, with their wide feet and fat phallic noses, giving them a look that in 1914 must have appeared truly monstrous to young and old readers alike.

East of the Sun and West of the Moonby Kay Nielsen (illustrator) and Noel Daniel (editor)
Taschen
2015, 168 pages, 9.4 x 11.7 x 0.9 inches
$26 Buy a copy on Amazon

Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. As the editor of Fine Books & Collections, Rebecca Rego Barry knows this better than most; her new book, Rare Books Uncovered, is filled with more than 50 such tales of book-collecting bonanzas. Recently, I interviewed Barry for Collectors Weekly. She told me about her conversations and correspondences with everyone from legendary rock guitarist turned book hunter Martin Stone — he reportedly sold Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page a copy of the I Ching that had been owned by occultist icon Aleister Crowley — to author and book dealer Larry McMurtry, who typed out his book-discovery story before mailing it to Barry.

This raises an interesting question: When one person finds a rare book, is their gain always at the expense of somebody else? “That can be true,” Barry says, “but among the booksellers I work with, especially those that belong to organizations like the ABAA or the ILAB, there’s an ethical obligation not to swindle each other or people who don’t know any better, like little old ladies selling their husband’s things. Personally, if I were to go to a garage sale and thought I had found a $5,000 book on sale for a dollar, I would feel conflicted. In most cases, though, the more common example is that you see a book you feel like you’ve seen before and decide to take a chance on it. It’s only after you get it home and do your research that you know if you’ve hit the jackpot — or overpaid.”

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Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. As the editor of Fine Books & Collections, Rebecca Rego Barry knows this better than most; her new book, Rare Books Uncovered, is filled with more than 50 such tales of book-collecting bonanzas. Recently, I interviewed Barry for Collectors Weekly. She told me about her conversations and correspondences with everyone from legendary rock guitarist turned book hunter Martin Stone — he reportedly sold Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page a copy of the I Ching that had been owned by occultist icon Aleister Crowley — to author and book dealer Larry McMurtry, who typed out his book-discovery story before mailing it to Barry.

This raises an interesting question: When one person finds a rare book, is their gain always at the expense of somebody else? “That can be true,” Barry says, “but among the booksellers I work with, especially those that belong to organizations like the ABAA or the ILAB, there’s an ethical obligation not to swindle each other or people who don’t know any better, like little old ladies selling their husband’s things. Personally, if I were to go to a garage sale and thought I had found a $5,000 book on sale for a dollar, I would feel conflicted. In most cases, though, the more common example is that you see a book you feel like you’ve seen before and decide to take a chance on it. It’s only after you get it home and do your research that you know if you’ve hit the jackpot — or overpaid.”

Last month, Frances Dinkelspiel's new book, Tangled Vines, cracked the New York Times' Best Seller list. It's a great read, since it mostly follows the events leading up to an arson-caused wine-warehouse fire in 2005, in which 4.5 million bottles of wine worth at least a quarter-billion dollars were lost.

Dinkelspiel's account of that inferno, as well as the man who sits in jail for causing it, is riveting, but I found myself even more interested in the author's numerous references to an organization called the California Wine Association, which controlled as much as 84 percent of the state's wine business from 1894 until 1920. That means the C.W.A., as it was called, was in charge of millions of gallons of California wine that were stored in almost two dozen San Francisco warehouses, most of which were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and the fires that followed.

Another two million [gallons of wine] were salvaged from the C.W.A.’s main headquarters, at Third and Bryant Streets, but not before “the wooden tanks and casks came apart in the fire storm,” as [wine historian Charles] Sullivan describes it. The spilled wine might have washed into the streets as it had at other warehouses, but a “plugged sewer line” and the building’s solid concrete walls and floor kept the sloshing wine within the structure. Suddenly, the building itself had become a wine cellar, which enabled the C.W.A. to pump the precious liquid through fire hoses to a small fleet of barges, which were towed to Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley, where the wine was distilled into brandy.

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Last month, Frances Dinkelspiel's new book, Tangled Vines, cracked the New York Times' Best Seller list. It's a great read, since it mostly follows the events leading up to an arson-caused wine-warehouse fire in 2005, in which 4.5 million bottles of wine worth at least a quarter-billion dollars were lost.

Dinkelspiel's account of that inferno, as well as the man who sits in jail for causing it, is riveting, but I found myself even more interested in the author's numerous references to an organization called the California Wine Association, which controlled as much as 84 percent of the state's wine business from 1894 until 1920. That means the C.W.A., as it was called, was in charge of millions of gallons of California wine that were stored in almost two dozen San Francisco warehouses, most of which were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and the fires that followed.

Another two million [gallons of wine] were salvaged from the C.W.A.’s main headquarters, at Third and Bryant Streets, but not before “the wooden tanks and casks came apart in the fire storm,” as [wine historian Charles] Sullivan describes it. The spilled wine might have washed into the streets as it had at other warehouses, but a “plugged sewer line” and the building’s solid concrete walls and floor kept the sloshing wine within the structure. Suddenly, the building itself had become a wine cellar, which enabled the C.W.A. to pump the precious liquid through fire hoses to a small fleet of barges, which were towed to Stockton in the San Joaquin Valley, where the wine was distilled into brandy.

When Hunter Oatman-Stanford began working on an article about Neil Kaplan's collection of old passports, we had no idea his story would be so timely. Alas, the acts of terrorism in Paris, followed by the backlash against Syrian refugees, and then a certain political candidate's proposal to block all Muslims from immigrating to the land of the free, has given Kaplan's collection of old paper new meaning.

When Hunter Oatman-Stanford began working on an article about Neil Kaplan's collection of old passports, we had no idea his story would be so timely. Alas, the acts of terrorism in Paris, followed by the backlash against Syrian refugees, and then a certain political candidate's proposal to block all Muslims from immigrating to the land of the free, has given Kaplan's collection of old paper new meaning.

For his latest piece at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford spoke to filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz about the Horn & Hardart chain of cafeterias and automats. Despite being limited to Philadelphia and New York (a Boston branch was short-lived), Horn & Hardart was the largest food-service business in America from the 1930s through the 1950s. As it turns out, though, its famous automats were not especially automated, relying on hundreds scurrying cooks and kitchen staffers to fill entire walls of glassed-in compartments with plates of scrapple, deviled crab on toast, and nickel slices of apple pie.

Upon entering an automat, customers would head to one of the restaurant’s “nickel throwers,” who would give customers change to use at the banks of food-dispensing windows. “The most vivid and common memory that people have shared with me is of the amazing nickel throwers,” Hurwitz says. “Especially how, without even counting, the thrower could feel the exact change needed with her fingers. You’d give her a dollar, and she’d throw you 20 nickels across this beautiful marble or wooden counter.” Horn & Hardart’s machines accepted both nickels and quarters, though with such low prices, a few nickels often covered an entire meal: A cup of coffee was five cents; a ham and egg sandwich was ten.

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For his latest piece at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford spoke to filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz about the Horn & Hardart chain of cafeterias and automats. Despite being limited to Philadelphia and New York (a Boston branch was short-lived), Horn & Hardart was the largest food-service business in America from the 1930s through the 1950s. As it turns out, though, its famous automats were not especially automated, relying on hundreds scurrying cooks and kitchen staffers to fill entire walls of glassed-in compartments with plates of scrapple, deviled crab on toast, and nickel slices of apple pie.

Upon entering an automat, customers would head to one of the restaurant’s “nickel throwers,” who would give customers change to use at the banks of food-dispensing windows. “The most vivid and common memory that people have shared with me is of the amazing nickel throwers,” Hurwitz says. “Especially how, without even counting, the thrower could feel the exact change needed with her fingers. You’d give her a dollar, and she’d throw you 20 nickels across this beautiful marble or wooden counter.” Horn & Hardart’s machines accepted both nickels and quarters, though with such low prices, a few nickels often covered an entire meal: A cup of coffee was five cents; a ham and egg sandwich was ten.

We've all encountered what people today call Black Memorabilia — a Mammy cookie jar, a racist postcard — but have you ever wondered where these depictions came from, and why they are so common? In her latest article for Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Dr. David Pilgrim, author of Understanding Jim Crow, to get some answers to these and other questions. Hix learned that Black Memorabilia was popularized by post-Reconstruction whites to dehumanize African Americans, and that while slavery may have ended in 1865, Jim Crow has persisted in various forms and guises to this day, which helps explain why the presence of an African American family in the White House has not been enough to put America's racial history behind us.

Stock caricatures such as Mammy, Uncle Tom, Sambo, pickaninny children, coon, Jezebel, Sapphire, and the black brute were employed to spread these messages to millions of people. Companies mass-produced these images in every form — including postcards, cleaning products, toys and games, ceramic figurines, ashtrays, cast-iron banks, children’s books, dinnerware, songbooks, tea towels, cookie jars, matchbooks, magazines, movies, gag gifts, salt-and-pepper shakers, planters, fishing lures, trade cards, ads, records, and tobacco tins. If you lived during the Jim Crow era, you’d encounter such caricatures everywhere, in your newspaper, on restaurant walls, on the shelves at stores, and at the cinema or live theater.

“If you believed that black men were Sambos, childlike buffoons, for example, then why would they be allowed to vote?” Pilgrim says. “Why would they be allowed to hold office, serve on a jury, or attend public schools with whites? If black men were brutes who were a threat to white women, why would they be allowed to share beaches, public-school classes, or taxicabs? If black women were Mammies whose best roles in life were serving white families, why would they be allowed in other occupations when the society needed them for that? So the caricatures, and the stereotypes which accompanied them, became rationalizations for keeping blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Perpetuating these caricatures was a way to make sure you didn’t have to compete against black people economically. In short, it was a way of sustaining white supremacy."

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We've all encountered what people today call Black Memorabilia — a Mammy cookie jar, a racist postcard — but have you ever wondered where these depictions came from, and why they are so common? In her latest article for Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Dr. David Pilgrim, author of Understanding Jim Crow, to get some answers to these and other questions. Hix learned that Black Memorabilia was popularized by post-Reconstruction whites to dehumanize African Americans, and that while slavery may have ended in 1865, Jim Crow has persisted in various forms and guises to this day, which helps explain why the presence of an African American family in the White House has not been enough to put America's racial history behind us.

Stock caricatures such as Mammy, Uncle Tom, Sambo, pickaninny children, coon, Jezebel, Sapphire, and the black brute were employed to spread these messages to millions of people. Companies mass-produced these images in every form — including postcards, cleaning products, toys and games, ceramic figurines, ashtrays, cast-iron banks, children’s books, dinnerware, songbooks, tea towels, cookie jars, matchbooks, magazines, movies, gag gifts, salt-and-pepper shakers, planters, fishing lures, trade cards, ads, records, and tobacco tins. If you lived during the Jim Crow era, you’d encounter such caricatures everywhere, in your newspaper, on restaurant walls, on the shelves at stores, and at the cinema or live theater.

“If you believed that black men were Sambos, childlike buffoons, for example, then why would they be allowed to vote?” Pilgrim says. “Why would they be allowed to hold office, serve on a jury, or attend public schools with whites? If black men were brutes who were a threat to white women, why would they be allowed to share beaches, public-school classes, or taxicabs? If black women were Mammies whose best roles in life were serving white families, why would they be allowed in other occupations when the society needed them for that? So the caricatures, and the stereotypes which accompanied them, became rationalizations for keeping blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Perpetuating these caricatures was a way to make sure you didn’t have to compete against black people economically. In short, it was a way of sustaining white supremacy."

For much of the 1990s, Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York, adhered to a predictable pattern of waking up, going to work, returning home, drinking as much as a half-gallon of vodka, and then passing out. He was a serious alcoholic, as Hogancamp and Chris Shellen make clear in Welcome to Marwencol (Shellen produced a documentary on Hogancamp’s life in 2010). He also liked to dress in women’s clothes.

Hogancamp didn’t know it, but this last fact would change his life when he drunkenly mentioned it to a stranger in the Luny Tune Saloon, sometime before closing in the wee hours of April 8, 2000. Shortly after exiting the bar, he was brutally beaten by the man and four others, who left his broken and bloodied body in the middle of the street. He would spend nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital.

After his release, Hogancamp’s recovery was aided, essentially, by playing with dolls. He got into it when he rediscovered his childhood interest in World War II miniatures. The tiny objects, though, were too small for Hogancamp’s shaky, post-recovery hands to paint, so the owners of his local hobby shop suggested he try detailing figures at a larger 1:6 scale. Dressing the figures proved good therapy for Hogancamp, and before long he had moved on to Barbies and action figures, for whom he eventually built a fictional but physically real place called Marwencol, named after himself, a friend named Wendy, and a neighbor named Colleen.

Welcome to Marwencol covers Hogancamp’s decline, beating, and recovery, but mostly it details the world he created and photographed, as well as the characters he conceived to inhabit it — the last third of the book tells Hogancamp’s Marwencol tales in graphic-novel form. Besides Hogie, the stand-in for Hogancamp, we meet Wendy and Colleen, five sadistic SS soldiers (obviously Hogancamp’s attackers), as well as Anna Romanov, a Russian princess who appears to be based on Hogancamp’s real-life ex-wife, Anastasia, who he married while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. These characters and dozens of others populate the stories Hogancamp has written to set his world in motion, and while Hogancamp’s fiction is clever and engaging, I was most interested in the dual denouement to his story – that the attack beat the alcoholism out of him (43 days in the hospital was enough to dry him out), and that he still enjoys wearing women’s heels.

For much of the 1990s, Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York, adhered to a predictable pattern of waking up, going to work, returning home, drinking as much as a half-gallon of vodka, and then passing out. He was a serious alcoholic, as Hogancamp and Chris Shellen make clear in Welcome to Marwencol (Shellen produced a documentary on Hogancamp’s life in 2010). He also liked to dress in women’s clothes.

Hogancamp didn’t know it, but this last fact would change his life when he drunkenly mentioned it to a stranger in the Luny Tune Saloon, sometime before closing in the wee hours of April 8, 2000. Shortly after exiting the bar, he was brutally beaten by the man and four others, who left his broken and bloodied body in the middle of the street. He would spend nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital.

After his release, Hogancamp’s recovery was aided, essentially, by playing with dolls. He got into it when he rediscovered his childhood interest in World War II miniatures. The tiny objects, though, were too small for Hogancamp’s shaky, post-recovery hands to paint, so the owners of his local hobby shop suggested he try detailing figures at a larger 1:6 scale. Dressing the figures proved good therapy for Hogancamp, and before long he had moved on to Barbies and action figures, for whom he eventually built a fictional but physically real place called Marwencol, named after himself, a friend named Wendy, and a neighbor named Colleen.

Welcome to Marwencol covers Hogancamp’s decline, beating, and recovery, but mostly it details the world he created and photographed, as well as the characters he conceived to inhabit it — the last third of the book tells Hogancamp’s Marwencol tales in graphic-novel form. Besides Hogie, the stand-in for Hogancamp, we meet Wendy and Colleen, five sadistic SS soldiers (obviously Hogancamp’s attackers), as well as Anna Romanov, a Russian princess who appears to be based on Hogancamp’s real-life ex-wife, Anastasia, who he married while serving in the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. These characters and dozens of others populate the stories Hogancamp has written to set his world in motion, and while Hogancamp’s fiction is clever and engaging, I was most interested in the dual denouement to his story – that the attack beat the alcoholism out of him (43 days in the hospital was enough to dry him out), and that he still enjoys wearing women’s heels.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/03/a-fictional-but-physically-rea.html/feed14432081The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic reveals a society's struggle for its identityhttp://boingboing.net/2015/09/11/the-book-cover-in-the-weimar-r.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/09/11/the-book-cover-in-the-weimar-r.html#commentsFri, 11 Sep 2015 17:24:49 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=420805

Books about book covers and jackets have long been a favorite of publishers, in part, I’m assuming, because the subject is at once self-congratulatory and economical. There are books devoted to American modernist covers, Penguin paperbacks, and covers designed by individual artists, such as the recent title on Edward Gorey. The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic, though, which focuses on covers and jackets created in Germany from 1919 to 1933, is unlike any of those tidy projects. Edited by book collector Jürgen Holstein, The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic is comparatively messy, revealing a society’s struggle for its identity after a humiliating defeat in the Great War, but before a new regime would rise up and instigate a conflict that would prove far, far worse.

Filled with 1,000 or so covers from Holstein’s collection, Weimar Republic is not designed merely to be a premonition of World War II. Instead, thanks to its thematic and publishing-house organization, we learn about the role of publishers in Germany, as we witness a young democracy trying to figure out everything from the limits of taste to the emerging prominence of film. Some covers depict Berlin’s notorious nightclubs. Others describe life in newly Soviet Russia. Naturally, considering his stature at the time, Upton Sinclair’s work figures prominently, including a 1930 Elias Canetti translation of Sinclair’s 1911 novel, Love’s Pilgrimage, whose cover features a disturbing photomontage of abortion forceps paired with a rose, the work of the great German artist John Heartfield. Other clues that we are between the wars are the numerous titles relating to the 1927 trail of Sacco and Vanzetti, but it’s the 1923 George Grosz cover illustration of a man licking a storm trooper’s boot that will probably lodge in most readers' minds. That, and the 1930 caricature by Heinrich Hoffman of a German politician named Adolf Hitler, who would become the nation’s chancellor in just three short years.

Books about book covers and jackets have long been a favorite of publishers, in part, I’m assuming, because the subject is at once self-congratulatory and economical. There are books devoted to American modernist covers, Penguin paperbacks, and covers designed by individual artists, such as the recent title on Edward Gorey. The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic, though, which focuses on covers and jackets created in Germany from 1919 to 1933, is unlike any of those tidy projects. Edited by book collector Jürgen Holstein, The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic is comparatively messy, revealing a society’s struggle for its identity after a humiliating defeat in the Great War, but before a new regime would rise up and instigate a conflict that would prove far, far worse.

Filled with 1,000 or so covers from Holstein’s collection, Weimar Republic is not designed merely to be a premonition of World War II. Instead, thanks to its thematic and publishing-house organization, we learn about the role of publishers in Germany, as we witness a young democracy trying to figure out everything from the limits of taste to the emerging prominence of film. Some covers depict Berlin’s notorious nightclubs. Others describe life in newly Soviet Russia. Naturally, considering his stature at the time, Upton Sinclair’s work figures prominently, including a 1930 Elias Canetti translation of Sinclair’s 1911 novel, Love’s Pilgrimage, whose cover features a disturbing photomontage of abortion forceps paired with a rose, the work of the great German artist John Heartfield. Other clues that we are between the wars are the numerous titles relating to the 1927 trail of Sacco and Vanzetti, but it’s the 1923 George Grosz cover illustration of a man licking a storm trooper’s boot that will probably lodge in most readers' minds. That, and the 1930 caricature by Heinrich Hoffman of a German politician named Adolf Hitler, who would become the nation’s chancellor in just three short years.

About two-thirds of the way through NK Guy’s enormous, gorgeous, and thoughtful new Taschen book, Art of Burning Man, the author/photographer makes a small confession: “For all the wonders of Burning Man, it has to be said that not all the art is inspiring. (more…)

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About two-thirds of the way through NK Guy’s enormous, gorgeous, and thoughtful new Taschen book, Art of Burning Man, the author/photographer makes a small confession: “For all the wonders of Burning Man, it has to be said that not all the art is inspiring. (more…)

Most of the guitarists, bassists, and mandolin players in photographer Jay Blakesberg’s just released gem of a new book, Guitars That Jam: Portraits of the World’s Most Storied Rock Guitars, are members of bands that use rock, bluegrass, the blues, and R&B as launch pads for improvisational jams. But one artist stands apart from this group – Willie Nelson – who posed for Blakesberg in 2014 at the Lockin’ Music Festival in Arrington, Virginia with his famously beat-up classical guitar. Nelson calls his 1969 Martin N-20 “Trigger,” after the horse ridden by matinee idol Roy Rogers, but with all due respect to the red-headed stranger, Willie doesn’t quite get the metaphor right. Comparing his guitar, as well as the rest of the Martin, Gibson, Fender, Alembic, Modulus, and Ibanez axes in Guitars That Jam, to a horse is fine, but musicians like Willie, Jerry Garcia, Warren Haynes, Carlos Santana, Trey Anastasio, and Neil Young are polar opposites of the saccharin Rogers. I’d say they are more like rodeo stars, or perhaps elite jockeys, who ride their thoroughbreds, night after night, to the musical equivalent of the Triple Crown.

Blakesberg captures the energy of these artists (plus more than 50 others), the sheer beauty of their instruments, and the intimate relationship between artist and machine, with the sure hand and keen eye that has made him a favorite of rock bands and music fans from coast to coast. Accompanying each photo of the artist in performance with his or her guitar is a statement about the instrument, usually written by the artist. These range from the ethereal (“I didn’t go after this guitar; this guitar came to me,” says Steve Kimock of his 1972 Charles Lobue Explorer) to the loyal (“This is the one I always go back to,” says Trey Anastasio of his 2002 Paul Languedoc Custom) to the grudgingly respectful (“It’s heavy, and in general kind of a pain in the ass – just as a good blues guitar should be,” says Jackie Greene of his 2010 National Reso-Phonic Resonator). But Willie’s son, Lukas, has clearly caught the naming bug from his dad, and may even do the old man one better. “The name of the guitar is ‘Georgia’” Lukas says of his 1957 Gibson Les Paul, “but the other name for it is ‘the Spanish Inquisition,’ because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Nice! A young Monty Python fan! “It’s got an unexpected growl and a lot of spirit,” he adds, as does this terrific new book by Jay Blakesberg.

Most of the guitarists, bassists, and mandolin players in photographer Jay Blakesberg’s just released gem of a new book, Guitars That Jam: Portraits of the World’s Most Storied Rock Guitars, are members of bands that use rock, bluegrass, the blues, and R&B as launch pads for improvisational jams. But one artist stands apart from this group – Willie Nelson – who posed for Blakesberg in 2014 at the Lockin’ Music Festival in Arrington, Virginia with his famously beat-up classical guitar. Nelson calls his 1969 Martin N-20 “Trigger,” after the horse ridden by matinee idol Roy Rogers, but with all due respect to the red-headed stranger, Willie doesn’t quite get the metaphor right. Comparing his guitar, as well as the rest of the Martin, Gibson, Fender, Alembic, Modulus, and Ibanez axes in Guitars That Jam, to a horse is fine, but musicians like Willie, Jerry Garcia, Warren Haynes, Carlos Santana, Trey Anastasio, and Neil Young are polar opposites of the saccharin Rogers. I’d say they are more like rodeo stars, or perhaps elite jockeys, who ride their thoroughbreds, night after night, to the musical equivalent of the Triple Crown.

Blakesberg captures the energy of these artists (plus more than 50 others), the sheer beauty of their instruments, and the intimate relationship between artist and machine, with the sure hand and keen eye that has made him a favorite of rock bands and music fans from coast to coast. Accompanying each photo of the artist in performance with his or her guitar is a statement about the instrument, usually written by the artist. These range from the ethereal (“I didn’t go after this guitar; this guitar came to me,” says Steve Kimock of his 1972 Charles Lobue Explorer) to the loyal (“This is the one I always go back to,” says Trey Anastasio of his 2002 Paul Languedoc Custom) to the grudgingly respectful (“It’s heavy, and in general kind of a pain in the ass – just as a good blues guitar should be,” says Jackie Greene of his 2010 National Reso-Phonic Resonator). But Willie’s son, Lukas, has clearly caught the naming bug from his dad, and may even do the old man one better. “The name of the guitar is ‘Georgia’” Lukas says of his 1957 Gibson Les Paul, “but the other name for it is ‘the Spanish Inquisition,’ because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Nice! A young Monty Python fan! “It’s got an unexpected growl and a lot of spirit,” he adds, as does this terrific new book by Jay Blakesberg.